Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation

Summary

Local participation is the new democratic imperative. In the United States, three-fourths of all cities have developed opportunities for citizen involvement in strategic planning. The World Bank has invested $85 billion over the last decade to support community participation worldwide. But even as these opportunities have become more popular, many contend that they have also become less connected to actual centers of power and the jurisdictions where issues relevant to communities are decided.

With this book, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza consider the opportunities and challenges of democratic participation. Examining how one mechanism of participation has traveled the world—with its inception in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and spread to Europe and North America—they show how participatory instruments have become more focused on the formation of public opinion and are far less attentive to, or able to influence, actual reform. Though the current impact and benefit of participatory forms of government is far more ambiguous than its advocates would suggest, Popular Democracy concludes with suggestions of how participation could better achieve its political ideals.

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Acknowledgments

It is hard in a book like this, written about processes still unfolding, not to be taken in by current events. As we finish the book, political scenarios in Spain, the United States, and Brazil seem by turns dramatic, exciting, and uncertain. In Spain of course, Podemos, the new political-party-cum-movement, has in three years dramatically reshaped the political scenario after four decades of a staid, two-party deadlock that has been in place since the end of the Franco era. Whatever its electoral future or eventual policies, it will be impossible to speak of Spain without reference to this revolution against representation after the indignados movement in 2011. In the United States, Black Lives Matter has burst on to the scene, promising for some what appears to be the dawn of a new civil rights era. At the same time, right-wing vitriol and its angry electorate seem at a fever pitch in the country. And in Brazil, for many, the promises of participatory democracy, embodied by the perhaps crumbling Workers’ Party, seem now in need of much greater scrutiny. The phrase participation fatigue seems to be more in the mouths of activists, scholars, and even international agencies today than even a few years ago.

We have been unable to follow the advice we routinely repeat to our students: pick an ending date for the research and stick to it. If you must, we usually advise, save more current happenings for an afterword. Instead, such events form a living backdrop to this book. It is our sincere hope that our dialogue with this context (and our acknowledgment of it) will help round out the historical arc we trace here, and rather than give the book a shortened shelf-life, make it more relevant to discussions we intend to interfere in. The book is also intensely personal and a reflection of our own trajectories in the worlds we describe. Though we have never thought of ourselves primarily as experts of participatory budgeting, we have both been involved with PB, in one way or another, for a decade and a half each. Between us, from our different vantage points, we have seen this world develop and radically change. While a reader might be forgiven for thinking this book is written from a disenchanted point of view, we try to leverage our stance for critical and productive purposes. Our disenchantment actually masks a deeper enchantment, not with participatory budgeting but with the utopia of legislating the world to come.

We have accumulated friendships and debts in activist, practitioner, and scholarly worlds. We cannot hope to name them all, but some deserve special mention. Nicole Summers, who first worked on this project at Brown University, was a coauthor of Chapter 5 and generously agreed to including it in this book.

Brown University and the Watson Institute provided Gianpaolo an occasionally frustrating but exceedingly generative environment, in the form of very generously reduced teaching loads, ample research funds, and a lively intellectual community, to support his research and scholarship. The semester Ernesto spent there developing the ideas in this book was central to its genesis. Brown University summer research fellowships funded the excellent work of Donata Secondo and Nicole Summers for background research. The IGERT program at Brown also funded background research by Joshua Eubank. NYU and the Gallatin School, where the book was concluded, have provided a supportive and stimulating environment. NYU Global Initiatives provided Ernesto a productive visiting stint, while the NYU Gallatin Research Fellowship funded Grace Chen in research assistance. Humanities Initiative at NYU also provided crucial translating funds for the final stage of the book, and some of the very important work of Nina Griecci in editing the English.

IESA in Córdoba continues to provide Ernesto a vibrant intellectual home, and the generous semester IESA supported Gianpaolo as a visiting scholar was also key to the development of this book. The Spanish Ministry of Economics offered a valuable grant (CSO2012-38942) to Ernesto to finish his own research.

Perhaps one of the single greatest debts we owe is to Kate Wahl, our indefatigable and unbelievably patient editor at Stanford University Press.

Writing a book is always a struggle. This was a special one, as it was written by four hands across continents, time zones, and shifting professional commitments. It would have been literally impossible to finish the book without the presence of Hedwig Marzolf and Paula Chakravartty: their generosity and love are core pieces of the book. Their patience and wisdom were indispensable in our quest for coherence and the successful completion of the manuscript. Maybe they have heard a lot about participation, but we’ve learned a lot about love and patience.

Ernesto’s boys—Adrian, Tasio, and Gael—have spent half of their lives with this book. They met Aisha and Safina, Gianpaolo’s girls, at the halfway mark. The five push us every night to think about new imaginaries.

CHAPTER ONE

The Participation Age

Every day, participatory websites are created by parliaments, governments and local authorities, allowing citizens to contribute directly to decision-making processes, to debate political options in real-time, and thus to influence the decisions made by their representatives. Is this an answer to the so-called crisis of politics which manifests itself through citizens’ disaffection from political parties and representative institutions?

—Call for proposals for the Second World Forum for Democracy, 2013¹

In November 2013 the Council of Europe organized the Second World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France. More than 1,400 people from one hundred countries took part in this high-profile conference. The participants addressed twenty-one themes (organized in labs) under the conference’s overall theme, Re-wiring Democracy: Connecting Institutions and Citizens in the Digital Age. The goal of the conference was for participants to collectively reflect on the challenges facing democracy in societies characterized by political disaffection and to consider how to address these challenges through online and offline participation.

One of the keynote speakers was Alderman Joe Moore, who four years earlier had set up the first experiment in participatory budgeting in the United States, in Chicago’s 49th Ward. Less than two weeks after the conference, the Obama administration released its Second Open Government Action Plan, which called for greater citizen involvement in government through democratic participation.² The document recogniz[es] the value of the American public as a strategic partner and outlines twenty-three specific initiatives to increase citizen participation and transparency. These include identifying and documenting best practices of participation, involving the public in agency rule making, increasing citizen science programs, and promoting community participation in budget decisions through tools like participatory budgeting.³ At the time of the Open Government Action Plan’s release, political leaders and experts from more than a dozen African countries were attending the International Conference on Citizen Participation in Tunis.⁴ The organizers of this conference sought to encourage African citizens to participate in the management of public affairs across the continent.

Today participation is so ubiquitous that former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has described the current era as the Participation Age. According to Clinton this era is marked by widespread expectation for voice and engagement, and people whose voices were never heard [before] now can be heard.⁵ Clinton is not alone in this assessment. As Matt Leighninger writes in his 2006 book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance—And Why Politics Will Never Be the Same, In the 20th century, public life revolved around government; in the 21st century, it will center on citizens. Similarly very many others discuss the dawning of an era in which citizens have come to participate in all sorts of matters previously reserved for government bureaucrats and politicians. There is general agreement that we are living through what Caroline Lee, Michael McQuarrie, and Edward Walker have called a participatory revolution. Today, they note, across the political spectrum, increasing citizen voice is viewed as a necessary counterweight to elite power and bureaucratic rationality.⁶

Enthusiasm for citizen participation abounds, even if its magnitude is difficult to quantify. As Archon Fung suggests, part of the difficulty in estimating the extent of participation is that the forms of participatory innovation are often local, sometimes temporary, and highly varied.⁷ But all indications suggest it is a major trend. At the global level, the World Bank has invested $85 billion in development assistance for participation in the last decade.⁸ For North America a survey from 2009 found that almost all cities responded that they provided ‘opportunities for civic engagement in community problem solving and decision making’ and that nearly three-fourths of them had instruments in place for citizen decision making in strategic planning that year.⁹ In Western Europe the figures are similar, and several countries now mandate citizen participation as part of recent local government reforms.¹⁰

Whether citizen participation has actually displaced technocracy and elected politicians, a remarkable consensus has emerged around its desirability. Participatory democracy has become an imperative of our time, the subject of countless international conferences, government projects, and policy reforms, and is at the center of much recent contemporary political thinking.¹¹ In the last two decades an increasingly diverse cast of characters—multilateral donors, international NGOs, and policy experts alike—have touted participation in government as a panacea for a wide set of ills. Applied to both the Global South (particularly as seen in the post-Washington consensus) and the Global North, participation has become a central tenet in thinking about government. Alongside ideas such as good governance, NGOs, civil society, grassroots action, decentralization, sustainability, local innovations, and social entrepreneurship, participation has now achieved the status of something unquestionably good and infinitely malleable. From the World Bank to Occupy and the Arab Spring, to new political parties like Podemos, to NGOs and consultancies, the idea of participation today occupies an exceptional position in the pantheon of policy prescriptions. Across the political spectrum and across policy domains it has become a privileged prescription for solving difficult problems and remedying the inherent flaws of democracy.

It has not always been this way. Up until the 1970s participatory democracy was largely associated with the political left, social movement idealists, or local cooperatives and generally viewed with suspicion by planners in mainstream institutions.¹² In the United States, for example, Francesca Polletta has documented participatory democracy’s central role in the most important social movements of the 1960s and argued that participation conceived in this way was so important because it was prefigurative. The idea was that to operate in radically democratic fashion was to prefigure the radically democratic society and would thus make the means reflect the ends.¹³ Activists expected participation to bring about emancipation for citizens in a world otherwise dominated by political and economic elites.¹⁴ And when the large movements went into eclipse as small-scale and local initiatives, sympathetic observers from the left, like Harry Boyte, imagined this was the beginning of a backyard revolution in which these prefigurative practices, premised on equality, solidarity, and social justice, would yield the transformative changes that movements themselves did not manage to achieve.¹⁵

However today we are witnessing a new political moment in which citizen participation is no longer the assumed domain of outsiders but has become widely encouraged, if not directly mandated, by governments and multilateral agencies. Corporations themselves are beginning to promote participatory processes as part of corporate social responsibility campaigns if not as part of efforts to neutralize negative publicity from grassroots campaigns against them, as Ed Walker has documented.¹⁶ Participation is certainly no longer a counterpower; it has decisively become part of the planning of power itself. If talk of participation once evoked the Port Huron Statement and politically radical groups like Students for a Democratic Society, today we are as likely to hear it from the White House, British Petroleum, or the World Bank.

Moreover participation has evolved from being a corrective for entrenched professional expertise to being its own globalized field of expertise. According to Archon Fung the field of actors who initiate and support citizen participation now constitute a diverse and mutually interacting set of organizations and groups.¹⁷ Among them in the United States, for example, are the International Association for Public Participation, Everyday Democracy, the Kettering Foundation, and the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University as well as the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, the Participatory Budgeting Project, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.¹⁸ Caroline Lee, who has studied the rise of the Public Engagement Industry, dates its appearance to the late 1980s but notes a tremendous growth in the 2000s. Demand for services of the International Association for Public Participation, for example, tripled between 2005 and 2008.¹⁹ Today participatory instruments quickly travel the world as processes of fast policy transfer.²⁰ At times they seem to do so without apparent boundaries, as with the case we study in this book, which inverts the traditional journey of technologies from North to South.

The spread of participation globally—this age of participation—is profoundly paradoxical. In addition to its complicated origins and the broad cast of characters who today advocate it, the timing of events is also counterintuitive. Participation has spread precisely at the moment when an increasing number of decisions, because of their technical demands or their global scope, have become insulated from democratic decision making. Whether we are speaking of the specifics of global trade policy, the global property rights of water, environmental regulation, or the management of complex financial instruments, an increasing number of important decisions take place in juridical or expert settings completely beyond the reach of the demos.²¹ More than one commentator has noted the coincidental rise of interest in participation and an increasing neoliberalization of public policy as well as an increase in inequalities.²² Some have charged that participation not only has failed to arrest increasing inequalities but has directly been implemented to legitimate them. Colin Crouch has called the growing power of corporate interests and the concomitant emptying out of the power of democratic institutions to hold them accountable a growing postdemocratic condition.²³ Wendy Brown has described the current moment as a neoliberal stealth revolution that is systematically undermining the demos.²⁴ At the very least we are living in a context, as David Held and others have noted, of profound mismatch between scales of democracy and scales of decision making.²⁵

Participation and Its Critics

This rise of enthusiasm for participatory democracy that has taken place around the world over the last twenty years has certainly inspired skepticism. Critical voices protest that while participatory democracy’s scope has expanded, its emancipatory dimension has all but disappeared from policy discourse on the subject. Recently critics have disputed participatory boosterism for failing to address questions of power, inequality, and politics.²⁶ Frances Cleaver, for example, argues that the belief in participation is based on three postulates: participation is intrinsically a ‘good thing’ (especially for the participants); a focus on ‘getting the techniques right’ is the principal way of ensuring the success of such approaches, and considerations of power and politics on the whole should be avoided as divisive and obstructive.²⁷

More broadly, scholars have begun to point to participation, and participatory prescriptions specifically, as part and parcel of neoliberal reforms.²⁸ In general terms participatory democracy appears to have spread just as governments have retrenched. In many instances local governments have introduced participation to improve the fiscal management of public administrations facing financial constraints. Dwindling resources and uncertain futures have driven administrations to transform their practices to guarantee the services they promised. At the same time, they have had to satisfy new economic imperatives: efficiency, productivity, achieving goals, and so on. Is it any accident that, as some critics have charged, "participation is the buzzword of the neoliberal era?"²⁹

Relatedly there is the worry that participation paves the way to a depoliticization of the public sphere, a point made most forcefully by scholars within the governmentality tradition. As part of a new rationality of government that calls forward an entrepreneurial citizen, participation emphasizes important characteristics of that citizen: self-regulation, responsibility for individual problems, and a nonconflictive partnership with the state.³⁰ In this formulation people are conceived as individuals who are to be active in their own government.³¹ Governmentality scholars’ central concern is that participation works to deny the political basis of conflicts and inequities and shifts responsibilities for problems to individuals and communities.³²

This last criticism is particularly poignant because governments under the philosophy of new public management in the 1980s and 1990s tried to emulate private enterprise by turning citizens into consumers of government services, as we describe in the next chapter. In that model, citizen participation served the role of identifying individual preferences. The public realm was thus reduced to a site of conflicts over individual preferences and to a channel of communication between service providers and clients rather than a space for collective self-determination.

While these critiques are useful, we believe scholars should not so readily dismiss these emerging forms of participatory democracy. Setting aside for a moment the question whether participation makes for effective public policy, we should be attentive to the possibility that participation may shift power relations in a given context. Participation implies a collective space and also presumes a certain equality between participants, with each person a